Author: Ellie Harty

Just when we are all settled in, safe and snug, resting, complacent even, BOOM another change? challenge? blow? comes our way…and I don’t even write about politics! We’ve had many such blows, or perhaps said more charitably – challenges, in our relationship with our Church and its unending repression of some genders over others. At…
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More and more a possible path to justice for all genders, in the Church, in the world, becomes clearer to me: We must convince each other – and especially those in hierarchies and patriarchies everywhere – to act with the utmost urgency to restore, renew, and respect the endangered natural world. For as they –…
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Stained glass windows: Who doesn’t love them? They capture the brilliance of our days; of our sunrises and sunsets; and set our ancient stories on fire, infusing them with vibrancy, energy, glory. Safe within their luminosity we can rest, for the unchanging, the reassuring, the comforting, the certainties of the past are surrounding and protecting…
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“There is an endless net of threads throughout the universe…” Indra’s Net from the Rig Veda We see so much that divides and separates us. We write about those divisions weekly in these very posts.  We also delve into some remedies: giving gratitude for the gifts of women and other genders in leadership and ministry,…
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Maybe we’re too American for the Catholic Church. Maybe that’s been our problem all along.   I was reading an article about fashion, of all things, and thought about how the new, particularly American, movements in that industry might inform us in our own struggle. Apparently, some of the elder “statesmen” (author Vanessa Friedman’s word…
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If you are reading this and are female, you will know exactly what the “likability trap” is and probably have been at some point been at its mercy. I sure have and sometimes, I shudder to think, may still be. It’s a snare that entraps women who want to use their power to effect change…
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In October of 2017, Reverend Mary H. Lee-Clark, minister at the Second Congregational Church, United Church of Christ in Bennington, Vermont, wrote a piece called, If You Came to My Church…You wouldn’t have to say the Creed. After I recovered from my envy that her congregation had a female minister, and the longing it produced,…
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“It was painting, he said, that brought him to theology.” The “he” is Brother Emmaus O’Herlihy, an Irish Benedictine monk, whose liturgical paintings fit so beautifully in a ‘new church for a new day’ or even for revitalizing an old one hobbling along in its entrenchment. I’m so glad I save articles that I’m too…
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I came across a piece I saved from the February 19, 2019 issue of NCR about the need for warmth, which, believe it or not, may be even more relevant now that it is summer rather than chilly mid-winter. In August, our warmth is easy to gain; just step outside. We become complacent about how…
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On vacation in northern Michigan (and I do promise this is the end of my musings on how-I-spent-my-summer-vacation!), I visited Mackinac Island. No way could there be anything there relevant to women’s ministry and leadership in the Catholic Church there, I thought. Oh, how wrong. The relevance is truly everywhere we go. Here is a…
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